Me and Toumani

Or "Toumani and I"?...or how I got into West African music

Short updates:

1. This summer has been hot at times, but I thought I’d been feeling hotter than before with the temperatures in the 70s and 80s. Turns out I have a medical condition that’s making me feel hotter. I’ll see if the meds help.

2. Two baristas that I got to know have started a coffee bean business, called Swallow Coffee (not to be confused with Sparrow Coffee). I ordered a bag of Colombia Geisha. It appears to be really good beans that I’m not doing justice to at the moment—my grinder isn’t giving me a consistent size.

I remember calling Toumani Diabaté the greatest musician alive.¹ This was years ago, and well before last month, when he died in Bamako, Mali, at the age of 58. I have not found a better musician in the meantime.

My first real encounter with West African music, and in particular music from Mali, was late in my college years. My friend Theo was listening to some African CDs, possibly for a class, and showed me some of it. There was an Ali Farka Touré CD in the mix. I listened to it, and actually didn’t think much of it. The music left enough of an impression that I remembered his name, but it was probably too foreign for me to appreciate at that time.

I got my second chance when I was in grad school. During the summer of 2008, I went to a physics summer school at George Washington University in DC that ran for 3 weeks. The workshop was a lot of fun, and I still keep in touch with a few of the attendees even though we’ve barely crossed paths since then.

Anyway, GWU’s Lisner Auditorium had 2 concerts during the workshop: Brazilian legend Gilberto Gil² and Malian singer Salif Keita, and I wanted to decide which one to go to. This is an impossible choice if you ask me now. They were both must-sees. If you asked the 24-year old Satoru, he would play some songs on YouTube—music streaming wasn’t a thing yet. And he would decide that Salif Keita was more exciting than Gilberto Gil.

I don’t really question that judgment, even though Gilberto Gil was, and is, a Great that everyone should see if they get a chance. Salif Keita was already close to 60 then, but he had more energy on stage than anyone I’d seen before, and maybe since. Whoever called him the “Golden Voice of Africa” was also not wrong.

As of 2024, Brazilian music has also become a big part of my music diet, but I can also say that this decision to see Salif and not Gilberto had a huge impact on what I listened to for about a decade.

When I got home to Seattle, I found out that there was a Malian concert coming up. Mamadou Diabaté, a kora player³, was playing at Town Hall.⁴ Town Hall is a place that I remembered but couldn’t name, 16 years on—I’m glad I dug into this personal history. It’s a former church that still very much looks like a church, and a great setup to make the concert feel more communal.

This concert was a revelation, that hearing such pure notes at such speed produces such sensations. I bought his album Douga Mansa at the concert.

Mamadou’s music, though, turned out not to be the pinacle of kora music. That same year, I got a chance to see Toumani. He played at the jazz venue Triple Door, as part of the Earshot Jazz Festival.⁵

Where Mamadou’s style is muscular, Toumani’s is fluid and effortless. It almost seems impossible to be more fluid and effortless. During the concert, Toumani explained how he was playing the instrument with just 4 fingers:

Toumani: “This thumb plays the bass.” <starts playing the bass notes>
Audience: (OK, yeah, that’s the bass.)
Toumani: “This thumb plays the melody.” <adds the melody>
Audience: (That’s pretty fast, but it still sounds like 2 thumbs.)
Toumani: “Index fingers are for improvising.” <adds improvisation>
Audience: <incredulous laughter>

Triple Door, like a lot of jazz venues, serves food. Somehow, there were long stretches during the concert where there was no sound other than that of the kora.

I was lucky enough to see Toumani two more times before I finished school in Berkeley. One was a concert with his Symmetric Orchestra at Yoshi’s San Francisco⁶, in 2010.

That summer, I was planning on visiting my uncle who was living in Fiji at the time. When I saw that there was a Toumani show in town, I scheduled my trip around it.

This was big band popular music with a kora as one of the instruments, an entirely different musical vision from his solo show, which was traditional, just with Toumani’s flair.

Next time was a free concert by AfroCubism at the Stern Grove Festival, also in San Francisco.

The record label World Circuit was trying to get Cuban and Malian musicians to record together, and it would’ve happened in the late 90s if not for a visa issue for the Malian musicians. So instead, we got Buena Vista Social Club—wouldn’t we all like our failures to be so good. AfroCubism was their successful, but much less famous, attempt.

As you could guess, Toumani was not the only star here—I can immediately name singer and guitarist Eliades Ochoa from Buena Vista Social Club, Bassekou Kouyate on the ngoni (believed to be a banjo predecessor) and Djelimady Tounkara, a true West African guitar hero. This was a fun show where some top performers melded Latin and African musical traditions together.

Little did I know that this would be the last time I would see Toumani in person.

In 2014, he was touring for a new album with his son Sidiki. He had tour dates announced for the US. I lived in Massachusetts at the time, so I would’ve tried to go to the New York show. Soon afterwards, though, they had to cancel. I don’t know exactly why they couldn’t make it, but I’m not aware of Toumani making an attempt to make it to America after this.

Of course, I would keep listening to Toumani’s recordings over the past decade. His 2 albums with Ali Farka Touré, In the Heart of the Moon and Ali & Toumani, are classics, where different traditions in Mali are combined.

New Ancient Strings with Ballaké Sissoko⁷, aside from setting the standard for great kora music in his generation, is great focus music. I know Julie listened to it a lot during her grad school days.

And there were collaborations with non-Malian music: Béla Fleck’s banjo, Kurdish string player Kayhan Kalhor, French pop artist -M-.

As I was going through his recorded output after the news, I discovered the awesome albums Songhai and Songhai 2, with Spanish flamenco band Ketama. This was back in the 80s and 90s when young Toumani was making a name for himself and for the kora.

I hope you take a listen to some of these. There’s a divide between pre- and post-Toumani me in what music I can appreciate. I can’t promise that for you, but he was a truly great musician and deserves the attention of everyone who loves music.

1. A note on pronunciation. Mali was a French colony, so the spelling here is French; Toumani is too-MAH-nee, and Diabaté is jah-BAH-tay.

The French pronounce the letter j as a fricative (like the middle consonant in “vision”) where the tongue doesn’t fully close the gap with the roof of the mouth. So they couldn’t use j to write the English j sound, and they came up with di. There’s a bunch of other names starting with di from West Africa: Diaby, Diakité, Diallo, etc.

2. Edit: Somehow I wrote Gilberto Gil’s name as Gil Gilberto. Saying his name in my head made me realize the mistake.

3. Mamadou also happens to be a cousin of Toumani. But I wasn’t aware of Toumani yet.

4. Have you ever tried to find information about a concert that happened 10+ years ago? Because it can be really, really hard.

I was having so much trouble finding information about the Mamadou show that I was doubting myself about the order that I saw these musicians in. What I needed in my Google search was the name of the venue. Here’s the evidence that, yes, Mamadou Diabaté played at Seattle Town Hall in the fall of 2008.

5. This is a great festival. I looked over the past years and every year has multiple acts that I would’ve wanted to see.

The other show from 2008 that I remember vividly is the free jazz legend Cecil Taylor’s concert, at Town Hall as well.

6. which is no more.

7. I talked about Ballaké in June.

It’s upsetting that this was not true for even a month: “With Toumani Diabaté, [Ballake] is one of the 2 great living masters of the kora”